LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Three

      Four months later…Wednesday, September 24

      11: 00 a.m.

      Ellie Hatcher raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

      But the testimony she gave before Judge Paul Bandon was not really the whole truth. It was a dry, concise recitation of the basic facts – and only the facts – of a callout 120 days earlier. Time: 11:30 p.m. Location: a penthouse apartment at a building called 212 at the corner of Lafayette and Kenmare. Nature of the callout: a report of shots fired, followed by the subsequent discovery of a bullet-ridden body in the bedroom. The dead man: Robert ‘Robo’ Mancini, bodyguard to Manhattan real estate mogul Sam Sparks.

      Ellie allowed herself a glance at Sparks, who sat at counsel table with a blank-faced stare next to his lawyer, Ramon Guerrero. According to her police report, Sparks was fifty-five years old, but looking at him this morning, she could understand why he enjoyed the serial companionship of the various models and aspiring starlets who graced his side on the society pages. It wasn’t just the money. With his square jaw, bright green eyes, and a permanent Clint Eastwood squint, Sparks exuded the kind of chiseled intensity that was catnip to a certain kind of woman.

      Ellie was surprised that he had bothered to make a personal appearance. It was probably the man’s way of signaling to Judge Bandon that this hearing was just as important to him as it was to the police. The only spectator on the government’s side of the courtroom, in the back bench by the entrance, was Genna Walsh, the victim’s sister. Ellie had told her there was no point coming into the city for the hearing, but she could not be dissuaded. Perhaps Sparks was not the only one trying to send a message.

      Assistant District Attorney Max Donovan continued to feed Ellie the straightforward questions that would lay the groundwork for today’s motion.

      ‘Did the decedent reside at the apartment in which his body was found – the penthouse in the 212 Building at 212 Lafayette?’

      ‘No, he did not. Mr. Mancini’s personal residence was in Hoboken, New Jersey.’

      ‘Did he own the apartment where his body was found?’ Donovan asked.

      ‘No.’

      ‘Who does own the apartment?’

      ‘Mancini’s employer, Sam Sparks.’

      ‘In your thorough search of the crime scene, did you find any evidence to suggest that the decedent was staying long-term at the 212?’

      ‘No, we did not.’

      ‘No suitcase, no toothbrush or shaving kit, nothing along those lines?’

      ‘No.’ Ellie hated the formal back-and-forth that was inherent in testifying. She’d prefer to sit across a desk from Judge Bandon and lay it all out for him. ‘In fact, Mr. Sparks himself told us that very night that the decedent was only using the apartment for the evening.’

      Again, Ellie reported just the facts. According to Sparks, he had completed the development at 212 six months earlier and kept the penthouse for himself as an investment and as a place to host the European investors who increasingly preferred downtown’s modern lofts to the more conventional temporary housing stock in midtown. To further justify the space as a corporate deduction, he allowed his personal assistant and security officers to make use of the apartment when the calendar permitted.

      Max Donovan had pinned photographs from the crime scene on a bulletin board next to the witness stand. Moving through the sequence of photos, Ellie described the disorder in the apartment – the open cabinets and drawers, the relatively few possessions in the apartment tossed to the floor like confetti.

      ‘From the looks of it,’ Max said, ‘only the bathroom was spared?’

      In the final picture on the board, a single cabinet door in the otherwise tidy master bathroom was flung open, a pile of towels splayed on the tile floor beneath the sink.

      ‘That’s about right,’ Ellie responded.

      ‘I guess extra rolls of toilet paper and back issues of Sports Illustrated aren’t the usual targets of a home invasion.’

      Max’s comment wasn’t especially funny, but the bar for comedy in courtrooms was notoriously low, and the remark drew a chuckle from Judge Bandon.

      The point of the testimony was simple: the violent home invasion on May 27 of a seventh-floor condo overlooking Lafayette Street had nothing to do with poor Robert Mancini until Robo got caught in the crossfire. The bodyguard’s relationship to the apartment was too inconsequential – too tangential – for the dead man to have been the premeditated target of the four bullets that eventually penetrated his naked torso that night.

      No, the crime had nothing to do with Mancini. The real target was either a robbery or Sam Sparks himself, and robbery seemed unlikely. Despite the expensive furnishings – two flat-screen televisions, a top-of-the-line stereo system, the rug that doubled as art – nothing was missing from the apartment.

      So now the police wanted to know more about Sam Sparks.

      From the witness stand, Ellie eyed a silver picture frame behind the bench. In the photograph, a smiling Paul Bandon beamed alongside a perfect-looking wife and a teenage boy in a royal blue cap and gown. Outside this courtroom, underneath the robes, Bandon was a normal person with a real life and a family. She wondered, if she cut through the bull and laid it all out for him, whether Judge Bandon would understand how the series of events beginning on May 27 had led her to the middle of a battle between the district attorney’s office and one of the most powerful men in the city.

      Maybe he would understand how she had felt when Sparks had sauntered into the crime scene, in his custom-cut tuxedo, somehow dry and picture-ready on that rain-soaked night, so put out by the disturbance at his pristine penthouse. Maybe he could imagine the disdainful looks Sparks had given the police officers sullying his spotless pied-a-terre, the very officers who protected the appearance of order that allowed Sparks to earn billions in Manhattan real estate. Maybe he would realize that she hadn’t even meant to arrest Sparks and had immediately kicked herself for doing it. All she’d wanted was to wipe that smug look off his face, just long enough for him to give more of a rat’s ass about a dead man in his bedroom than the area rug in his foyer.

      If Ellie were telling the whole truth, she’d tell Judge Bandon that there was something about Sam Sparks that got under her skin. And she would try to explain that the only thing that bothered her more than that something was her own inability to maintain control in the face of it.

      Sparks’s rigid refusal to cooperate with the police investigation – all because of their first ill-fated encounter,

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